


Drawn to the Blood

by Mairead1916



Series: Bury Me Standing [3]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-02-27
Packaged: 2019-03-24 16:00:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13814574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mairead1916/pseuds/Mairead1916
Summary: Just days after Carl's death, Christine struggles to come to terms with the loss.





	Drawn to the Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Song accompaniment: Drawn to the Blood, Sufjan Stevens

Christine woke screaming. Realizing she had been dreaming, she tried to conjure up the details of her reality, did so, continued to scream. She brought her hand to her face to cover her still open mouth, muffle the sound. One, two, three, she counted in her head, finally closing her lips around the anguish that was still searching for a way out. People around her began to stir, grumbling slightly until they located the origin of the sound and fell silent. Christine couldn’t make their faces out in the darkness but knew they were filled with pity—perhaps fear as well, that this heartbreak might rub off on them if they were not careful. Even in the dark, she could feel their eyes on her and wished they would go back to sleep, leave her to fall apart in peace. As she heard the rustling of bodies lying back down, she almost smiled, glad she would not have an audience for what inevitably came next.

She would have thought her awareness of the panic attacks might stop them from coming but now realized they were like everything else in life. No matter how cognizant she was of the machinations of her world, she had no control over them. As her breathing became shallow and irregular and her heart beat faster than it ever had before, she staggered to her feet, rising from the mansion’s living room floor and walking outside where various Hilltop guards stood watch atop their raised towers. She wandered to the far corner of the property and crouched behind a trailer where her collapse would be less noticeable. Falling to her knees, she began to wretch, bringing up rancid-smelling saliva and nothing else. She hadn’t eaten since Alexandria’s destruction three days earlier, since Carl’s death in the burned-out neighborhood they had once called home.

Carl hadn’t allowed any of them to be there at the very end. “I have to do this,” he had said, reaching for his gun.

“No,” Christine said. “No, Carl. I can do it. You don’t have to.”

“I can’t make you do this. I don’t want you having to remember it, to live with it.” A tear had fallen down Carl’s cheek, and Christine thought about what he had been forced to do for their mother, what he had been forced to live with.

“I can’t live with making you face this alone,” she had said.

“This is how I want it.”

“No.” Christine had turned to her father. “Dad, don’t let him do this.”

Her father, distraught, barely able to speak, had croaked out, “It’s what he wants, Chrissy.”

Then they had all said their tearful goodbyes, Christine leaving last.

“You can pull the trigger,” she told Carl after Michonne and their father had left. “But I’ll stay with you. Be here so you’re not alone.”

“No.” Carl shook his head. “It needs to be just me.”

Christine had opened her mouth to protest further but stopped when she saw the desperate look on Carl’s face. She entertained the idea that she might actually be saving him pain by leaving him alone. She nodded, looked up at the church’s shattered stained-glass window to try to hide the tears gathering in her eyes.

“Christine,” Carl said, forcing her to look back down. “You need to be strong for Dad, ok? He can’t fall apart like he did with Mom. There’s not time.”

Christine had wanted to say that she was tired of being strong for their dad, that she had done her duty when their mother died, that it was his turn now. Instead, she had bent down and wrapped her arms around Carl as gently as she could, trying to get a sense of his shape, to commit it to memory, without squeezing him too hard, without hurting him.

Now, her back resting against the corrugated metal of the trailer, she wondered when her father would come find her. She didn’t think he had slept at all since Carl’s death. He and Michonne had immediately set about digging a grave and then, once they reached the Hilltop, he had volunteered for watch-duty every night, somehow always noticing when Christine was up and out of bed. Christine wondered whom he was actually watching—the Saviors or her.

She clutched her chest, sure she was having a heart attack, just as she had been the night before and the night before that. Thus far, she had always been wrong, always survived the night. Her eyes were closed, but soon she felt a hand on her back.

“Chrissy?”

It was, of course, her father. She didn’t need to open her eyes to know that but did anyway, staring into his ashen face, his sunken, red-rimmed eyes.

“Try to breath with me,” he said, forming his lips into an _oh._ “Like you’re sucking through a straw,” he used to say back when Christine was little.

Her very first panic attack had occurred when she was just six. Though out of the blue in many ways, the panic attacks were later described by a psychiatrist as likely stemming from a car accident her father had been in earlier that year, his first ever police injury, acquired while chasing a suspected criminal down the highway. Christine could hardly remember the days when a car accident—in which her father had suffered a sprained wrist and nothing more—was the most frightening interruption to her life imaginable. 

 _Be strong for Dad,_ Christine thought, but couldn’t.

“Sorry,” she said when she finally regained enough breath to speak, apologizing less to her father and more to Carl. _Sorry I let you down._

When they had heard the shot from the church’s front steps, Rick and Michonne had broken down, immobile, but Christine had stood up and run back inside, her father’s faint, “Chrissy, don’t,” hardly registering.

There was Carl, lying on the floor, the top of his head grotesquely opened out by the bullet he had shot through it. Christine had knelt beside him and rested her head against his chest, her concerns about hurting him no longer relevant. She pressed her forehead harder and harder into Carl’s sternum, hoping that if she just stayed there long enough she’d hear a heartbeat, hear lungs filling with air. After several minutes of this, she moved so she was sitting cross-legged by Carl’s head, lifted it gently, and placed it in her lap, stroking his hair the way she used to on family camping trips many, many years ago when Carl would get scared in the dark but not want to wake their parents, poking Christine instead until she turned and acknowledged his presence. Always a bit grumpy at first, she would quickly soften, tell Carl to get back in his sleeping bag and then maneuver herself so his head was in her lap. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she would say.

She whispered the line to Carl’s lifeless body, realizing it had never been truer. Nothing could hurt him any longer. Perhaps this should have been some consolation. It wasn’t.

Christine had removed a hand from Carl’s head and placed it behind her for support, her palm coming down upon dozens of glass shards. At first, she gasped, jerked away. But then, looking at the blood on her hand, the way her blood and Carl’s mingled, she felt a sense of appropriateness and placed her hand back on top of the glass, biting her lip to stifle a cry of pain. She had twisted her hand back and forth, allowing the shards to work their way deeper into her skin before lifting her hand up and placing it back in Carl’s hair, transferring some of the glass from her hand to his head. When her father finally walked in to fetch her, her hands were a mess, covered in brown, drying blood and green glass that made the myriad cuts look gangrenous. Carl, on the other hand, looked beautiful, almost beatific, the blood from his shattered skull bright red, his hair now flecked with green, blue, and purple, creating a radiant glow.

“What did you do?” her father asked when she raised her hands to show him.

When Christine smiled slightly, he fell to his knees and pulled her into a hug, sobbing.

Christine felt her father’s hands on her own, now, felt him prying them open. Without realizing it, she had curled her hands into fists, digging her fingers into her bandaged palms. She stared at them now, at the red that had bled through, overwhelming the white of the bandage.

“Chrissy,” her father said again, balancing her hands upon his, palms up, wrapping his fingers gently around her wrists.

“Sorry,” Christine said, this time directing the apology to her father and not to Carl. “I’m so sorry, Dad.”

Her father shook his head.

“I don’t know what to do next,” he said.

 _Be strong for Dad,_ Christine heard. She wracked her brain for answers but couldn’t find any.

“I don’t either,” she said.

One of the first things Carl had said to her, after revealing the bite, was, “This isn’t your fault.”

“I know,” Christine had said, even though it was. She didn’t want to fail Carl any further by contradicting him, didn’t want to see the sadness wash across his face when he realized she blamed herself. But, of course, she did. How could she not? It had been her job to keep him safe. Ever since he was born. Just because the job had grown more challenging since the outbreak, didn’t mean it had ceased to exist. She had failed in her duties and she would have to live with this for the rest of her life.

“I wish it had been me,” she told her father.

“No,” he said, wrapping his fingers a little more tightly around her wrists. “I don’t wish that.”

Christine looked into her father’s eyes. His face contained more despondency than reassurance. She believed him.

“We should get you fresh bandages,” her father said, standing and pulling her up with him.

“No. You should be keeping watch. I’ll take care of it.”

Her father looked skeptical but didn’t argue. Nodding, he wrapped his arms around her, drawing her into an almost smothering embrace. When he finally released her, his eyes were closed. Opening them, he nodded again. “All right.”

Then he was gone, walking back to the watch tower as the sun began to rise.

As Christine made her way back to the big house, she saw a figure standing in the doorway, Siddiq, the man Carl had been trying to save when the walker bit him. Christine wanted to hate him but didn’t. Perhaps hatred would come with time. Perhaps it wouldn’t.

As she approached him, Siddiq bent his head in acknowledgement, his eyes widening as he saw her bleeding hands.

“What happened?” he asked.

Christine shrugged. She knew Carl would want her to make Siddiq feel welcome, to feel useful. She considered holding her hands out to him, asking him for help, but couldn’t bring herself to do so. She may not have hated Siddiq, but she was still not willing to place herself in such a position, to be so utterly vulnerable in front of him.

“I’m sorry,” she said, pushing past him.

“For what?” he called after her, but Christine couldn’t hear him. She was speaking to someone else.

 


End file.
